Over the last few years, visual media arts, such as photography and motion pictures, have become more sophisticated. In fact, applications that allow a user to create and edit images, film, and other visual content are becoming commonplace. For example, a photographer may use a digital camera to take a high-resolution photographs, which are then imported to a computer. Thereafter the user edits the photographs using photo-editing software executing on the computer.
Conventional photo-editing applications have user interfaces that include separate windows for different features available to users. For example, an image, imported from a digital camera to a computer for editing by an application executing on the computer, is typically displayed by the application in one window, while the controls to adjust the appearance of the image are displayed in another window. The available space displayed on the screen by the application must be large enough to accommodate both the image being edited and the controls for performing the editing. One of the problems with conventional photo-editing applications is that as the capabilities provided by photo-editing applications increase, the controls to perform these new functions occupy more and more area on the interface provided by these applications.
To illustrate, consider that the user interface for a conventional photo-editing application typically includes a toolbar and menu options. The toolbar and menu options take up a portion of the screen. Within the user interface, the image being edited takes up another portion of the screen. Then, in addition, other windows that contain editing tools and other features may take up yet other portions of the screen. In the end, a large portion of the screen space is used to display content other than the image being edited. In fact, even if the user expands the image to fill the entire photo-editing application, a portion of the image is still obscured by the application's other user interface controls. As a result, when the user modifies the image, the user only sees the changes that occur to the visible portion of the image.
In addition to obscuring portions of the image, user interface controls also require the user to take his eyes off the image when he makes adjustments to it. For example, since adjustment controls are in a separate window from where the image is, the user has to look at the adjustment control, adjust it, look at the image to see how the change affects the image, look back at the adjustment control, adjust it some more, look back at the image to see the effect of the additional changes, look back at the adjustment controls, and so forth until the user has made all the necessary changes.
This process is inefficient and distracts from the editing process. It requires the user to take his eyes off the visual media to adjust settings and then look back at the image only after the changes have already been applied. Thus, the full effect of the changes to the visual media is only perceived once the user looks back at it. Then if the user does not like the change, he has to go back to the adjustment controls to make further edits to the settings.
To reduce this problem, some visual media editing applications use a HUD (heads-up display). A HUD is a user interface control that is mostly transparent so that a user can see through it to the underlying content. The purpose behind a HUD is to allow the user to bring controls closer to where the user is editing the visual media. Thus, the eye movement between the visual media and editing controls is lessened. Often, the user can position a HUD over the content before making adjustments to the visual media. A problem, however, with the use of HUDs is that although they provide some degree of transparency, they still obscure some portions of the visual media as it is being edited.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.